Mainstream culture has become exceptionally literal; we now have a hard time processing tragedy or satire. The recent 40K controversy illustrates this neatly. If I was Iain McGilchrist I might attribute this to the creeping dominance of left-brain thinking, but sometimes I wonder if the problem is just that people aren't spending enough time reading proper books.
How does one define tragedy? I think the simplest and best description is that tragedy is fiction which reminds us that fundamentally virtuous people with good intentions can nonetheless end up in bad situations (and, perhaps, those bad situations arise precisely because of those good intentions).
How does one define satire? Again, sticking with a simple description, it is what Chesterton called the "only moral to everything": "[S]uperiority is always insolent...pride goes before a fall...and [there] is such a thing as being too clever by half." It is fiction that reminds us that people often puff themselves up with their own sense of virtue and thereby overlook the fact that they lack it in crucial respects.
Tragedy and satire are in that sense two halves of the same coin. They remind us that there is not a direct line going from having a sense of acting virtuously and achieving virtuous results. Basically, happy endings don't follow from being "a good person". The main difference is that in a tragedy, it is probably necessary that the protagonists are actually good people, whereas in a satire, they aren't, but think that they are (or present themselves as such).
It is foolish to suggest that tragedy and satire each only serve one function, but they undoubtedly share a main function, which is to remind us that you cannot immanentise the eschaton. You may think yourself to possess powerful insights that will allow you to realise a better world, perhaps even an ideal world, but you are undoubtedly wrong. Your vision will only realise itself as tragedy or as farce.
This is why political extremists of all stripes hate and fear both tragedy and satire. Soviet and Nazi art were nothing but kitsch: art in which "shit is denied". For the ideologue, there is a path from having the right intentions to the right results. There is no space for tragedy or satire in that kind of moral universe. Both tragedy and satire are fundamentally about shit - reminders of the existence of shit - and that cannot be tolerated. If one believes that one is on the path to achieving a desired end-state, then the inevitable continued existence of shit has to be denied, and forcefully.
Warhammer 40K embodies elements of both tragedy and satire. On the one hand, having good intentions (defending humanity against foes which would see it utterly corrupted or destroyed) does not necessarily lead to good outcomes, and in fact, ironically, itself creates bad ones (what you are defending itself becomes corrupted in the attempt). On the other, it has always had its tongue in its cheek: yes, the space marines look cool, but they are also ridiculous, melodramatic and po-faced, and we're all in on that joke. And, of course, if you don't want to think about it in either of those terms - look, John Blanche art and cool models and explosions.
In a literalising culture like the one which we inhabit, one wonders if this can last. Sooner or later, will the powers that be at Games Workshop be forced into playing down these elements of tragedy and satire, and transforming 40K into something more recognisable to mainstream understandings of the nature of fiction? Something more akin to the kind of morality play which increasingly dominates film, TV and fiction, in which the good people with good intentions achieve good results in the end and the bad people get their just deserts? At the moment, their defence against accusations of political incorrectness (yes, we have honestly come to the point at which a fictional dystopia which nobody in their right mind would want to live in, set 38,000 years in the future, is being criticised for being politically incorrect) is tipping into a reliance on it being a "satire". I don't expect that to last.
I agree with these sentiments entirely. Perhaps it was always thus, but it increasingly feels like many of world's somewhat-imagined social problems could be solved by reading more good books.
ReplyDeleteI don't think GW will ever have to change, though, or transform its fictions into that lame, didactic form that some seem to think all art must now be. Where that change has occurred, it's been because the people producing the work *believe* in the terrifying "art must be morally correct" dogma (c.f. the state of YA fiction).
GW has matched society's baseline in terms of inclusivity, representation etc, but because the editors and bosses at GW will never be woke millennials/Gen Zers, the fiction will not become recognisably woke.
I think this "1 Spanish Nazi" story blew up bigger than GW would have liked, largely because they put out a well-meaning press release. One early take I saw and agreed with, before GW's response, was "it's just one guy, not a trend, don't waste the oxygen on it". As with many moral panics, this whole thing feels confected by a few overexcited Twitter users.
That was certainly my reaction as well. 99.9% of the people who do that kind of thing are doing it for effect. If you cause a big fuss in response, they win. Don't play the game they're playing. It's human psychology 101, or ought to be.
DeleteReading (probably re-reading) your 2016 post on kitsch and Kundera and grimdark, I recalled these lines from George F. Walker's play "Better Living", in which the abusive absentee father returns to the family to plead the case for letting him back into the house:
ReplyDelete"Tom: I can kill. With my bare hands. I can rip flesh. I can take a knife and cut throats, or put it in bellies. When the total shit of the future comes I can look it in the eye and keep it out of this fucking house. I can cheat. I can lie. I can steal. I can beg. I can sneak and grovel and betray and burn things to the ground to protect this family. I am the soldier of the total shit future. I am the provider of the total shit future. I am the basic ingredient for survival."
The eldest daughter goes on to upbraid him for being a "complete asshole" because he thinks that anything could ever be "total shit", and the argument proceeds along those lines.
In other words: grimdark kitsch posits a total shit future. But beware the riposte by the critics of grimdark, who have a fatal tendency to accuse fans of the genre of being "complete assholes", and thereby fall into their own kitsch trap, in which only "total assholes" (aka "fascists", or whatever dirty word is popular at the time) could ever believe that anything could be "total shit".
I just thought this was an interesting parallel to the 40K/grimdark/fascist conversation happening here and at Patrick's place.
Very interesting contribution.
DeleteKundera packs so much insight into that small passage. The vast bulk of politics, particularly extremist politics, is really all about different forms of kitsch.
I really noticed this looking up articles in Kotaku and its ilk in reference to the "Spanish fascist" story. None of it is really journalism in the sense of imparting facts to the audience. It is all about signalling a unification with the readership around certain kitschy principles.
A paranoia exacerbated by the tendency of Awful Internet Political People to run the 4chan gambit: using over-the-top expressions of hate to recruit the like-minded, but retreat to the bailey of "clearly this is satire, can't you take a joke?" if challenged.
ReplyDeleteAnd Norman Lear had to dial down the satirical bigotry of his TV creation Archie Bunker after the guy ended up getting the most fan mail on the show.
Yeah, I dunno. There are bigots in the world but I really don't buy the narrative that there are all these fascists out there twirling their moustaches and using "satire" to recruit adherents. As I said in a comment above, I think 99.9% of it is rather sad cases saying outrageous things because they think it's funny to get a rise out of people and it gets them attention. I honestly don't think it's much more complicated than that.
DeleteI mean, I went to a boys' school in a rough area. Winding somebody up to the point at which they lash out, and then saying "Haha, you can't take a joke!", is what teenage boys are best at. I see 4chan as merely a grand extension of what happens in secondary school classrooms.
This is the second essay in a week I've read about a fairly bland policy statement that basically only says "the Imperium of Man isn't a fun place to live and if you think that it is you're deluded", something which is pretty uncontroversial really.
ReplyDeleteWhile I'm not 100% convinced over-literal-mindedness is as sweeping of an issue as you are, I do acknowledge its existence. However I think there are probably better examples than this.
Update: I've spent about half an hour on-and-off thinking about literal-mindedness in literary criticism and the broader sociopolitics, so while I disagree with your interpretation of the facts I must commend your essay on effectiveness.
DeleteI don't think you can watch the average boxed set on e.g. Netflix and dispute that literal mindedness and morality plays are the order of the day. It's what makes them all practically unwatchable (to me, anyway). I mean, have you ever tried to watch "Anne with an 'E'"?
DeleteI don't want to suggest that all drama and fiction is of this type, but it seems increasingly prevalent.
More concerning is the reaction of audiences, who seem more and more to expect that films, TV series and books should simply confirm a particular moral framework, and doing that well is all that really matters.
I have not been keeping up with Netflix boxed sets, so I shall have to take your word on this matter.
DeleteI'm also really unsure what if anything this whole discussion has to do with Warhammer 40k being a satire, which it sometimes is.
Wait.
DeleteStop.
Noisms, am I understanding your argument correctly? Is your evidence in support of the existence of a general media trend towards our stories becoming increasingly more literal-minded and lacking in moral complexity that an adaptation of *a literal children's book series* from *1908* unwatchable to you?
This seems like an incredibly ill-chosen example to illustrate a point that wasn't terribly well-supported by evidence to begin with.
It would only be a bad illustration if the series was actually in any way faithful to the books! In fact, that’s what makes it a good example, actually - modern sensibilities are such that the original Anne of Green Gables seems like a work of deep moral profundity in comparison to its recent reinterpretation.
DeleteHonestly, if you don’t agree that mainstream culture has become excessively literal then you must be living on Mars. I’m not sure what the value would be in trying to show you other examples when viewed from a distant telescope.
Excessively literal compared to what?
DeleteThe average Netflix boxed set should be compared to popular TV juggernauts of the time - the '80s had Dallas and Magnum PI sitting at the top of the popularity charts, the '90s gave us Shakespearean high art such as Friends and ER, and the early aughts were flooded with a deluge of vapid reality TV.
There was a brief transitory period when prestige TV was a thing - shows like The Sopranos and The Wire are considered classics for a reason -, but even those series were less popular at the time than their legacy would suggest(The Sopranos had, at the height of its popularity, a third of the viewership of American Idol), and their emergence represented a deviation from established TV trends.
The argument that the quality of current-year media represents an all-time low in history is as old as media itself, and as such, should be held to strict scrutiny. "Back in my time, TV just used to be *better"* may be an emotionally satisfying exclamation, but to me, it seems no more grounded in reality than "Warhammer 40k encourages fascists" - which is curious, because you can clearly recognize histrionic nonsense masquerading as a factual claim in one case, yet fail to do so in the other.
You've managed to turn this into a discussion of TV, somehow, when the example of Netflix box sets was only offered by way of a throwaway example.
DeleteTo open it out: look at the recent verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. It appears to be impossible for a large proportion of the US population to look at that case as just a messy, complicated and unique set of facts, as criminal cases always are. Instead, for both sides, it is imbued with totemic significance in a war between good and evil. We are increasingly less capable of understanding events has having their own embodied, circumstantial specificity, as signifying more than one thing at once, and instead have become obsessed with putting them into general, fixed categories which signify only one thing. There is GOOD and there is BAD and everything must fall into one or the other. And what is more, the necessary consequences MUST follow from that categorisation.
I think of the dystopian worlds, unlikeable protagonists, bizarre tales of Barrington J. Baley, himself an early author of the budding 40k universe, when it was still in full on Moorcockian psychedlic horror mode, or the Inquisitor trilogy by Ian Watson, or the doomed odyssey of the Soul Drinkers Chapter. I think of the Tale of the Heike, or the violent protagonists of the Illiad or the ethereal versimilitude of Gene Wolfe. Once we prided ourselves on exploring different viewpoints, or worlds not our own.
ReplyDeleteThere was a recent novel of necrons vs necrons; the Infinite and the Divine. The cover alone is everything you need to know. Modern entertainment, inoffensive, unchallenging, where the fanatic is not wanted and the hobby is replaced with the lifestyle brand.
How dare you, sir! The Infinite and The Divine is one of the best books BL has published in years. Part of its brilliance is how it interrogates the whole 40k setting in a way that's totally divorced from the grimdark Imperium guff. It's also very, very much *for* the long-suffering GW hobbyist. I'm at a loss to see how one could read that book in particular and come away thinking it was evidence of GW trying to build a brand where "the fanatic is not wanted". It is literally about a nerd who collects soldiers and puts them in display cases.
Delete"I wonder if the problem is just that people aren't spending enough time reading proper books."
ReplyDeleteI run into that sort of thing all the time: Instead of reading books, all too many people instead skim through internet articles and/or watch internet videos. For example, during coffee hour at my Eastern Orthodox parish, only one other guy besides myself reads the Bible, the Church Fathers, and liturgical texts. These things of course run into the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pages. After one reads a lot of it, he acquires an instinct for how these authors thought. Then somebody who has never read ANY of it, but has spent an hour or so trawling through whack-a-doodle internet sites, comes up and starts talking about how the Church Fathers taught all sorts of things that they never even mentioned, and that it is unthinkable that they even entertained. All because of internet nonsense substituting for close reading of serious texts.
That sort of thing is extraordinarily common in my experience.
Yes, and it's in inverse proportion to the absolute confidence with which people spout their views about how society should be arranged. It's as though the less one is capable of sustained thought, the more absurdly certain one becomes that one is right. But then, I suppose one should hardly be surprised by that.
DeleteSurely that's related to the old saying about (if I may paraphrase a bit) how the more you learn, the more you realize how much more there is to learn. Some folks clearly do not draw that conclusion. There are people who believe doing the work to achieve even the most shallow understanding of a subject means they're now qualified to speak as experts on it, and often in any tangentially related field as well.
DeletePer this interview they lost the satire thread a long time ago.
ReplyDeletehttp://grognardia.blogspot.com/2020/11/interview-rick-priestley-part-ii.html
Great post but, excuse me, as someone who actually HAS immanentised the Eschaton, I take objection to your claim that it's impossible.
ReplyDeleteNo, really, we did - see https://the-mycelium.com/2019/04/23/the-cerne-to-cern-pilgrimage/ - although all of that reads like satire, and indeed probably was, as one of the 69 people involved I can assure you that there's not a word of a lie in that write-up. Very important that you don't get your immanentising mixed up with imminentising though, Alan Moore set us straight on that one. And, again not a word of a lie, Alan did us a tarot reading to determine the outcome of our act, which came out as a straight run of the major arcana. So I'm pretty sure we did something.
Speaking of whom, I really love Alan's description of satire as the most powerful spell there is - when you cast a satire on someone, you can not only kill them, you can trash their reputation beyond the grave, for centuries to come. Powerful things, satires.
All of which has very little to do with Warhammer, but is a lot more fun, and requires very little painting ability.
" So I'm pretty sure we did something."
DeleteGiven the impossibility of actually doing nothing, of course you did something. Even when you might think you're doing nothing, your personal gravitational field is affecting the rest of the universe, your body's waste heat is mucking around with local thermodynamics with who knows what kind of knock-on butterfly effects, "simple" respiration is pumping CO2 into the environment at a steady clip, and that's without even considering your impact on the microfauna dwelling within you.
The question isn't if you did something, but what effect the many somethings you did have had. Identifying that out of the endless wash of effects produced by other somethings that have been done is pretty close to impossible, though. Those major arcana are just as likely to have come up due to fluctuations in the brightness of a young star whose light hasn't reached our galaxy yet as any of the somethings you did. Or Alan was cheating his reading.
Personally I find that playing Rogue Trader (aka 1st edition Wahammer 40K) is more fun than actively practicing chaos magic, but to each their own.
It doesn't have to last. It just needs to keep the rats out of the seed corn until a frost drives down the population of the rats. Moral panics tend to last not as long as the damage done to insulate an IP from a moral panic, and GW knows this.
ReplyDeleteI think the issue is that the pressures which resulted in this moral panic aren't going away.
DeleteWhy do you think this will be more enduring than the satanic panic?
DeleteThe satanic panic took place in an era in which there was a bedrock of journalistic commitment to objectivity, which has now basically disappeared. The panic can just go on and on and on and on....
DeleteAccurate. Journalistic integrity is a thing of the past, and of course the rise of social media has also changed the informational landscape enormously from the days of the Panic.
DeletePretty much the most objective news outfits got on the satanic panic wagon back in the day. I don't think they get more objective than 60 Minutes back in that era. This is just a big company doing damage control in a hamfisted way, as big companies do, because they think having their product associated with Nazi's is bad for business. Which I honestly hope is the case.
DeleteLooking from outside, you are also affected with the same silliness. Which also affects your chosen definitions of the genres - and said definitions are from the start aimed at making them the same (which they ain't).
ReplyDeleteAlso looking from outside - this certainly will continue, and I'm personally waiting for time when your opinion leaders will start to burn books and forbid works of hippies of 60s for being politically incorrect. ;((
By the way, both Soviet and Nazi Germany authors USED both satire and tragedy. And had absolutely no problems with them, as long as the shit was aimed at acceptable targets. ;))
"...but sometimes I wonder if the problem is just that people aren't spending enough time reading proper books."
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if I agree or disagree. Care to define "proper" there? Are we talking about the medium, be it dead tree or electronic file? Accepted by a traditional publisher (implying some degree of editorial vetting) or put up as pdf/POD vanity project? Or is it format that defines "proper" with novel-length works in the hundreds of pages trumping novellas, short works of fiction or nonfiction, or the even smaller snippets like most blog posts (your own included)? Or is there some other possibility I'm overlooking?
I know what noisms means, and it's got nothing to do with the quality or length of the materials. Their age probably has a small bearing, as good ideas tend to persist in the noosphere. But it's... good books, books that teach and rationalise and connect and in some way bring you infinitesimally closer to the number 42.
DeleteI'm wary of this argument though. Plenty of batshit people have read all the right books.
I find that question a little irritating, to be honest. It feels like being argumentative for the sake of it - or like you're trying to somehow trip me up or trap me.
DeleteYou surely know what I mean by a "proper" book - precise definitional games don't really interest me.
@noism No, I really don't, or I wouldn't have asked. The word "proper" has lots of meanings in English, and some highly subjective, others more objective. You've dodged the question rather than answering it, leaving me wholly unable to decide what you mean. You don't seem to have an trouble expressing yourself generally, why is explaining "proper" such an issue?
DeleteIf dansumption's correct about your intent (and I have no reason to believe so but at least it's something to work with) then I'm in agreement with the contention that reading that kind of book (often called "difficult" these days, IME) has largely fallen by the wayside. Too many people that still read do so solely for entertainment, or for confirmation of existing beliefs and opinions.
But I also share his wariness about the (apparent) argument that it's a cause of the rise of extreme literalism, rather than a symptom.
I initially read Dick's first comment as trolling/sealioning, but now assuming that's unfair, how about the most literal definition - a "proper book" is any text that can be rendered as a physical book object that a child would agree was a "book". Basically all books, including ebooks, then.
DeleteLet's start with that - get people to read some books, any books, and work from there. The distance from Dan Brown, Tom Clancy or Mills & Boon to Eco, Le Carre and Austen is much, much shorter than the distance between that second group and The Masked Singer, pewdiepie and Facebook memes.
Dick - fair enough. I actually think cmrsalmon’s comment has a lot of merit to it, but what I meant was really anything above the level of cookbooks, celebrity autobiography, low-level non-fiction of the extended op-ed variety, etc.
Delete“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
ReplyDeleteObviously, in the grand scheme of things the fact that the negative dialectics of Leftist-corporate vandalism will lead to the ultimate deconstruction and erasure of 40k is cosmically insignificant. It is an example of the revolution manifesting itself through public ownership of corporate interests, and in particular the fruit of control of artistic endeavor by the interests of capital markets. Because the dialectics are negative, the fact that the artistic endeavor in question was originally subversive and Left-leaning is of no consequence, for yesterday's revolutionary vanguard always becomes today's counter-revolutionary foe in the endless cycle of planned ideological obsolescence and Soviet cannibalism.
I suppose that one can wait with fingers crossed to hope that the perpetual circular firing squad of the Left completes its work before the vandalism is finished, but in reality liberation pertains to the individual and not the group. 40k or whatever else you don't want to have vandalized can be whatever you want it to be to you, so the consumer of the art is free from the tyranny of its purveyor as soon as he stops listening. It is the master who dismisses the lackey and not the other way around. I get why stuff like this stings, though.
On a side note, I wonder if the Satanic impostures of Transhumanism will some day unveil a "shitless man"? I don't see why it isn't mechanically feasible. What they could not possibly produce of course is a human devoid of ugliness, which is the constant companion of the human soul. Even if everyone were a shitless Adonis, that would probably be the ugliest phase of our wretched existence. It is an astounding (I really mean that) cosmic irony that the only place where ugliness is entirely absent is the Beatific Vision, but those who try to erase all ugliness in Creation are (apropos of your invocation of Voegelin) always the ugliest creatures and the least likely to enter Beatitude. Even though I'd be pleased if all the Communists in the world spontaneously combusted, or were turned into pillars of salt, at the same time the irony of their fate is very depressing to me.
It puts me in mind of Peterson's moral outrage against the claim "that wasn't real Communism", in that the person who claims that is really claiming that if *he* were in the place of Stalin, Mao, Kim, Pol Pot, etc., that he would have resisted temptations and brought about utopia. A supreme narcissism, which is after all just another way of talking about Pride, the original Satanic impulse. The "revolution" is, as Alinsky acknowledged, just a continuation of the original Satanic revolt against God. And if against God, then against the Logos. Which brings us back to Winston Smith, and the observation that as long as 2 and 2 make 4, the Party cannot win. National Socialists in the USA are already denouncing mathematics as "racist".
I don't think that ideologies can ever win over reality, regardless of the extent of our mastery over matter. How much human calamity will we suffer before ideology dissipates and reality makes its triumphant return? I suppose the classic 40k answer is that it just goes on and on forever, and the human condition becomes more and more perverse. I'm perfectly comfortable with that, since following Augustine I see anything in this life with a flavor of decency to be merely an aperitif to the feast. Although that's not to say that I don't get all wound up about such things sometimes.
How much human calamity will we suffer before ideology dissipates and reality makes its triumphant return?
DeleteHard to say, but my instinct tells me: a lot.
I find it interesting how much you claim to be anti-ideological (and that all ideologies are equal) when you are clearly speaking from an ideological position.
DeleteWhat ideological position is that, since you know me so well?
DeleteHaving opinions, intuitions and inclinations is not the same as being ideological, you know.
On the other hand there certainly is a minority of morons who are too dumb to understand satire and take WH40K imperial propaganda at face value.
ReplyDeleteSure, but I don't think that really matters. Nobody is being radicalised by playing WH40K.
DeleteFuck man, reading a random sampling of today's headlines will radicalise a fellow (in one direction or another!) faster than a lifetime of playing 40k.
DeleteIt might be worthwhile to go into the Starshiptroopers or the Judge Dread- effect and explore the notion that, while Warhammer clearly started as satire, it manages to tap into themes and characters that have been left fallow in many of our modern 'normal' fictions yet that resonate with many people and that over time, these elements have come to dominate the satirical ones. These tales of grim neccessity, sacrifice, implacable foes, the burdens of ones ancestors, facing the unknown, and having strength of conviction likely resonate on the same note as stories of heroic roman centurions or knights, and fascism is hardly required in order to enjoy them, they have been appealing to boys since before the printing press! The proposition that something as labyrinthine and epic as the Horus Heresy book series, arguably the apex of its lore, has much satire in its DnA is very hard to defend. Tragedy, yes, of miltonian proportion, and not the triumphalism that one could point to as signs of heresy against dogma.
ReplyDelete